With so much research and clinical expertise co-located in the same place, there is nowhere quite like Birmingham when it comes to translational medicine, as Ros Dodd discovers.

The skyline of South West Birmingham is dominated by the University of Birmingham’s elegantly slender Victorian clock tower juxtaposed with the three chunkier, funkier-looking towers of the Queen Elizabeth ‘super hospital’. It is a fitting vista; for the University, steeped in more than a century of eminent medical research, and the hospital, the second-largest in the UK and one of the country’s ‘centres of excellence’, together constitute the beating heart of one of the world’s outstanding and pioneering biomedical hubs.